


You were in my dreams (for twenty years)

by TerraRising



Series: Flipping the Hourglass [1]
Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Eggsy can't let go, F/F, Fix-It of Sorts, Hartwin, I Don't Even Know, I Tried, M/M, Not really a fix-it fic, Possibly Pre-Slash, Pre-Slash, Roxy is an awesome bro, Roxy is not amused, Time Travel Fix-It, not really sure where I'm going with this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-13
Updated: 2015-04-14
Packaged: 2018-03-22 15:57:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3734761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TerraRising/pseuds/TerraRising
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world breaks and then puts itself back together. The sun still rises, everything keeps moving forward as most things must eventually. Eggsy still dreams of Harry every night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. You were in my dreams

**Author's Note:**

> Once upon a time, I dragged my friends into a showing of "Kingsman: The Secret Service" and fell in incomprehensible love with this ship. I've been reading so many Hartwin fics I finally decided to try my hand at one. In the middle of exam season. Score.

The world is saved and everything is still thrown into chaos. They run back to find Kingsman in splinters, deadly ones. Several of their agents had been betrayed by Arthur, some had turned; all had been unmistakably deadly, leaving behind nothing but a wreckage of dead bodies in their wake in the brief minutes that Valentine had managed to activate his plan. (Or turned into a bloody, macabre Rorschach inkblot courtesy of a single motion of Merlin’s hand)

 

It’s true that between Merlin, Roxy, and Eggsy, they had stopped him, yes, but for hundreds of thousands it had been too late.

 

But still they healed, they picked up the pieces, learned how to trust each other again in the ways that they could. Or at least to trust enough to put aside any personal differences to get the mission done. Once they’ve pieced their network back together, Eggsy is officially offered the spot of Galahad. He takes it, face solemn, serious beyond anything anyone expects from, well, _Eggsy_. If his eyes were suspiciously glassy during the ceremony, no one calls him out on it. No one dares.

 

Roxy is a solid presence for Eggsy throughout it all, and he tries his best to be her rock too. It takes him months to warm up to the other Kingsman agents, perhaps it’d be more accurate to say it’s still a work in progress. So Eggsy just sticks close to Roxy and hangs out around Merlin when he’s back at the base, annoying the technician until his Scottish brogue slips out as he flings creative curses at Eggsy’s laughing back when he makes a strategic retreat.

 

He runs mission after mission with Roxy by his side and Merlin’s scathing sarcasm a steady presence in his earpiece, cementing them as a partnered pair despite initial protests from higher ups that it was reckless and nonsensical to pair _two_ rookies together. But their success rate speaks for itself and shuts up even the loudest dissenters until they’re reduced to grudging acceptance and grumbling behind holograms without bite. They know each other, work well together; Eggsy skirts on just the right side of destructive recklessness while Roxy is the epitome of a well-trained Kingman agent. They’re efficient, playing off of the hard earned trust they have for the other to always be in the right place at the right time, knowing their partner would do anything possible to make sure they both came home at the end of the night.

 

It’s after the latest mission (where Eggsy almost scares the living hell out of Roxy as he demonstrates his talent for joyriding, flooring their escape vehicle _backwards_ through narrow alleyways. She takes shot after shot at the crooks chasing after them while screaming at Eggsy, letting him know in no uncertain terms that if he gets them killed like this there would be hell to pay) that Eggsy arrives home to realize that it’s already been an entire year since Harry died.

 

A year.

 

It had felt like both an eternity and mere seconds. A year where Eggsy had settled his mum and his sister into a comfortable house provided by the Kingsman, the Unwin family living off a generous and steady salary for the first time in years. A year since Eggsy had settled seamlessly into the action-packed lifestyle of being a Kingsman like he was born for it. An entire year where Eggsy’s dreams were still haunted by memories of Harry’s smiles, Harry’s lessons and his delightful wit, Harry’s silhouette as he left that room the last time Eggsy ever laid eyes on him. A year of waking up every day choking back tears and fighting to surface beneath the weight of a thousand regrets. A part of Eggsy hates himself for being able to keep living even after Harry no longer can. Some nights, that part of him is much louder than he can bear.

 

Eggsy finds himself mixing martinis in the dead of the night in front of Harry’s grave. If he shows up at Roxy’s place after at three in the morning, looking for all the world as if someone had shot JB in front of him, she never blinked an eye. Just pulls him in with a gentle cuff to the back of his head for being ridiculous, why didn’t he just ring the damn doorbell instead of standing outside in the chill like an idiot, and ushers him in front of the fireplace. She wraps him in blankets and shoves a pint in his hands, lets him talk himself hoarse until he slumps against her steady shoulders, fingers carding gently through his hair. The next day he wakes up and they both pretend nothing happened.

 

When he leaves to take Daisy to school, he pecks her cheek playfully and she swats at him in mock annoyance. He lets his answering grin say _Thank you_ for him and her eyes answer _Always_. Even if they’re never going to be lovers, they’d always shield each other from the rest of the world when their partner is at their weakest.

 

The following night Eggsy stocks his fridge with all five of Roxy’s favourite Häagen-Daz flavours just because he can. She rings the doorbell promptly at eight with take-out from that Thai place they’d both taken a liking to and he tries his best to keep his swearing as quiet as possible to keep from waking Daisy when she absolutely creams him at Mario Smash Bros. They eat their way through three of the five cartons of ice-cream while watching _Pretty Woman_ and make plans to meet at the training room tomorrow afternoon and work off every last calorie.

 

Years pass. Roxy ends up dating the actress who played the rich heiress they were supposed to seduce during exams. Her name is Sophia, she’s got wicked aim and this uncanny ability that all females working in Kingman seem to have to hide guns underneath skin-tight dresses. The three of them get on like a house on fire and Eggsy doesn’t even feel half as awkward as he thought he’d be third-wheeling on their dates from time to time. He’s there when the two women decide unanimously to get engaged and he stands beside Roxy, glowing with pride and smiling fondly as she shares her first kiss with Sophia as lawfully wedded spouses.

 

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, of course. Eggsy and Roxy both collect their fair share of battle wounds. He carries a puckered scar from a bullet sent with love from a blonde bombshell in Moscow, a barely-there white mark from a stab wound to the kidneys that time he let the mark get _too_ close, a toe that heals slightly crooked when some asshole tried to run him over with a fucking tank and he barely managed to throw himself out of the way; it’s all part of the job description. Eggsy has his own collection of newspaper headlines in a quiet study tucked away at home and by the time he’s in his thirties, they’ve saved the world two more times because insane megalomaniacs never stop popping out from the woodworks. It’s annoying at fuck but it never gets old and no one ever comes as close to international mayhem as Valentine did, most of it kept carefully contained to their home countries by meticulous agents, not just the Kingsman.

 

Eggsy still mixes martinis in front of Harry’s grave every year on his death day. Still winds up there after a particularly hard mission, spilling his heart out to a frozen slab of unforgiving granite. Still wakes up gasping from dreams of Harry Hart being shot in the fucking face while the sun is haloed in his hair and he falls backwards, back arched, falling in slow motion until he hits the floor spilling _red red red_ , red everywhere.

 

But he still gets up every morning, forces himself into the shower, walking into the washroom where poor, silly, lovable JB is now resting beside Mr. Pickles. He goes through the motions and tries to take joy in the happiness his loved ones have. And he’s happy too, sometimes, it just never seems to last. The glow fades out into a numb sort of quiet cold until he’s left with nothing but his own damning thoughts.

 

When Eggsy is just over forty, he’s certain that life is as good as it’s going to get. Daisy graduated as a top student and captain of the girl’s varsity football team, with offers from three top universities waiting for her. His mum never remarried after Dean (who was smart enough not to show his face again after Eggsy almost beat his face in the last time he tries), but is in a loving common-law relationship with a nice bloke who owns a bookstore around the corner. A quiet way to spend their days, perfect for the aging couple who knew how to be gentle with the other’s unspoken wounds. Roxy and Sophia adopt a beautiful little girl they name Lydia and makes Eggsy her godfather and though Eggsy has never been particularly religious, can barely stand churches for reasons left unsaid, he swears to be the best godfather in the world and spoils the little bundle of joy rotten while teaching her at least fifty ways to hit a kidnapper where it hurts most.

 

Yet he can never quite get Harry out of his head, can never seem to ‘get over him’ no matter how much well-meaning friends and family gently urge him to try and let go of the dead man’s memory. Because Eggsy can’t, he can’t bring himself to allow anything about Harry to fade from his memory when the man had given him so much. Can’t stop thinking about all the “could have beens” if Harry had made it home from Kentucky that faithful day in 2014.

 

In the still moments before the sun breaks across the horizon, Eggsy allows himself to admit that the feelings he harboured for Harry goes beyond that of a protégé’s hero-worship for his mentor. But it’s too late now, almost twenty years too late so Eggsy thinks of Daisy and Roxy, of his mum, of darling Lydia’s smiles, and he gets up to report for another mission.

 

It’s not Roxy by his side this time, but rather the newly ‘knighted’ Gawain, Roxy’s candidate. The young man is still a little green but is good at keeping his cool even when nailed down by rapid machinegun fire and so Eggsy doesn’t mind being temporarily paired with him while Roxy finishes running a solo mission in Cambodia. If he’d been forced to go with Bedivere who exudes posh and probably bleeds blue, reminding Eggsy of Charlie in all the worst ways, he probably would have found a way to push the younger man off a building just to shut him up.

 

They’re being sent to take care of yet another crazed billionaire with delusions of grandeur, this time a Mrs. Zinnia who’s convinced the world needs to be returned to the Dark Ages to survive. (Seriously, how many insane billionaires are there in the world and why do they all have to set their tiny little hearts on inevitably destroying the world or human civilization as they know it? Why couldn’t they just be really obsessed with space-travel or something and funnel their funds towards going to live on Mars where Eggsy wouldn’t have to deal with them?)

 

The two of them land quietly in the sprawling woods behind Mrs. Zinnia’s property and make their way towards her unnecessarily opulent mansion. Eggsy is pretty sure that if Mrs. Zinnia did end up back in the Dark Ages it would serve her right to realize she has to live in a world without all the conveniences and privileges that she’s used to. He’s almost tempted to let the ‘plan’ happen but that would mean failing the mission, no matter how skeptical Eggsy is about her ‘time machine’s’ capabilities. For all they know, it would probably do little else but splutter and blow up spectacularly but on principle he ought to stop this to prevent her from accidentally leveling every living thing within a 500 kilometer radius with her bloody contraption.

 

It’s almost insultingly simple for Eggsy to take down her guards. They were either mercs without proper training or they just happened to be the drop-outs of whatever training class they were a part of. While Gawain heads over to neutralize Mrs. Zinnia, Eggsy makes his way to the control room to dismantle the device. When he steps inside, he almost snorts when he realizes that the ‘time machine’ standing innocuously in the middle looks like a rip-off of the telephone booth from _Doctor Who_ , Merlin’s quiet groan letting him know that the man shares his amusement at the sheer ridiculousness of some wanna-be villains.

 

He pulls the door to the booth open cautiously even though Merlin’s scans don’t detect any traps inside it. There’s a couple of panels and a whole board filled with buttons more colourful than they need to be and Eggsy strolls into the tight space boldly, ready to go home already and make good on his promise of taking Lydia to the zoo.

 

As he reaches into his pocket to pull out the hard drive masquerading as a lighter that would give Merlin access to the system to shut it down, Eggsy finds himself pausing for an inexplicable reason. His eyes stray to the controls, taking in the fact that the device is set to go back in time in fifty-year increments. Suddenly his head is swimming with thoughts, with possibilities, with wicked temptations and for the first time in years he feels a heady rush of emotions that has nothing to do with the high of adrenaline-filled missions.

 

He could press that button, just one time. He could do this. He could go back to a time where Harry was still alive and kicking, could go back and change it all, _fix it all._ Eggsy can hear Merlin’s voice growing increasingly louder in his ear as he notices Eggsy’s hesitation but he barely pays attention to is. He connects his line to Roxy’s with a twitch of his finger (how convenient technology has become) and her voice chimes in beside Merlin’s, curious and confused.

 

“Galahad?”

 

He breathes in the overly filtered air and lets it all out in a rush of words. “Roxy. Rox. I think I can, I can fix it all. I can go back and fix it all.”

 

“Eggsy, what are you talking about?”

 

“For gods sakes, Lancelot, talk Galahad out of his foolishness,” Merlin cuts in, hijacking their communications line and turning it into a three-way call, “He’s standing inside a supposed time-traveling telephone booth and I think he’s gone insane.”

 

“Eggsy. No,” she breathes with sudden realization, because it’s Roxy and she knows how much Harry’s death has eaten away at him all these years, has put him back together every year after the anniversary of Harry’s death, “no Eggsy, don’t do this. That machine won’t fix anything. Eggsy you’re supposed to come home tomorrow afternoon and have lunch with Daisy, don’t you dare do this Eggsy, what on Earth am I supposed to tell your mother?”

 

Eggsy can hear Merlin in the background, ordering Gawain to his position _right now_ , telling Eggsy he had to stop this madness. All Eggsy can do it stare at that button, Right hand hovering over it steadily in wonderment.

 

He thinks of how angry Daisy will be with him and how it would tear his mother apart. He thinks of how absolutely pissed off Roxy will be even as her voice starts to be tinged by desperation as she begs him to step the fuck away from that bloody contraption and let Gawain take care of the rest. He thinks about how Sophia would glare at him for making Roxy worry, of how little Lydia wouldn’t understand just why her ‘Unca Eggy’ wouldn’t be taking her to the zoo this weekend.

 

His hand curls back towards his body, he can hear Merlin’s relieved sigh and Roxy chanting ‘thank you, thank you, yes, step away from it Eggsy’, even as his mind races through all the apologies he could never give enough of.

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

Gawain bursts into the room just as Roxy screams loud in his ear.

 

Eggsy presses the button.

 

The rest of the world falls silent.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is actually a poll

Since I've got people threatening to kill me or themselves (or both, you don't seem picky) if this isn't continued.......

  
  
Okay so I've currently got several different endings floating around in my head so I figured I'd just throw it out there and see what you folks think. You want all the endings or should I just pick one?

  
  
Either way, one gets written before the rest so here's one way I'm going to ask you lovely people to help me out here:  
  
Option 1: The Time Machine Works  
  
Option 2: The Time Machine Doesn't Work

  
  
Let me know what's your pick (for both questions) and majority rules.

 

  
  
Peace y'all. (Please don't kill me in my sleep, no one wins)

**Author's Note:**

> So I'm really not sure where I'm going with this. Will there be a sequel? Maybe. Maybe not. 
> 
> Either way it's the first time for me posting on this site, I'd love to hear some feedback from all you lovely people, so hit me with your best (and worst)!


End file.
